Granada la bella

where anything is possible

The church of Santa Ana, with features attributed to Diego de Siloé, the same architect who designed the Cathedral, corresponded most closely to what Lorca considered to be the characteristic aesthetic of Granada, especially in its graceful minaret-style Mudejar tower, more suitable for pidgeons to alight in that to bear heavy church bells. Its design displays all the old elegance and grace of Granada, with proportions in stark contrast to those of its period, the Renaissance, whose Cesarean tradition was alien to the aesthetic of Granada with its bombastic facades and mighty rows of columns..."

The Cathedral, built on the site of the original central mosque, did not find favour in Lorca's eyes and was incompatible with the aesthetic of Granada, with its "cold tower" and its vast bulk, with which it imposed the Roman and imperial stamp of Carlos on the old Moorish city. Like the weighty Renaissance Palace, so insensitively plonked among the delicate palaces of the Alhambra, simply did not fit in with Lorca’s view of the true Granadine aesthetic.

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The Monastery of La Cartuja, according to Lorca in a postcard sent to his brother, was the last great piece of architecture built in Granada. However, while the Renaissance and the Baroque undeniably produced great works of art, these were the exception rather than the rule as far as Granada was concerned. From the moment of the conquest of Granada by the Catholic Monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabel, the city started on its irreversible decline. This view contrasts with the ideology of the right, expressed by Antonio Gallego Burín in his excellent Historical and Artistic Guide of Granada, according to which the Monastery of La Cartuja surpasses the Arab architecture of Granada and is part of Granada's baroque splendour. For him there is an ascending continuity from the Nazarid dynasty that produced the Alhambra through the Catholic Renaissance and Baroque and the decline for him and his fellow thinkers doesn't really set in until the Nineteenth Century.